Pish Posh. That is what I used to say about online classes. You know. Those fake classes, not the real ones where you have to get out of bed, shower, and gather at the agora to toil over the ideas. Online learning. Pish Posh. Then I had a hybrid online class and realized there is some rhetoric floating in these little boxes on the computer screen filled with composition. Maybe this seemingly artificial classroom is the perfect laboratory to create a new discourse.
I wonder if the intersection of ideas in a digital environment—a space void of physical materials where ideas are being born into a type of blank slate space—can create new alternative discourse. Context is essential to rhetoric and composition. Rhetoric applies knowledge of audience, purpose, and writing situations to create the framework that makes an argument or message a reality. This framework is crafted from knowledge of an audience: their values, beliefs, and background. Composition also relies heavily on knowledge of identity and situatedness. In order to more accurately assess and teach students, they can be individually and locally assessed. Multilingualism, writing experiences, homelife, lifestyle, heritage, and literacy profiles of students are understood through complex interactions with a physical being in relation to classroom space, materials, teacher, parents, community, culture of a geographic region. How do online spaces prohibit or impair students and instructors within those spaces from acquiring knowledge of each other? Moreover, how can this impairment of identity and lack of context be negotiated, even manipulated in a digital environment, so traditional knowledge-making created in mainstream classroom environments are subverted through new alternative discourse created online?
